Three States of Wax

Three States of Wax takes its name from an early work of philosopher of science Michel Serres, l’Interférence. Serres asks what should be the material, the object of study of the natural sciences in the digital age. He returned to Descartes’ thought experiment: is a piece of wax, under all its possible deformations, still the same piece of wax? Serres describes three approaches though history: firstly the ‘geometric’ description of early natural philosophers, then the analytical ‘scientific’ study of its properties. Now, says Serres, such an object of study should be considered a nexus of information. It bears all the traces of its own history and interactions with its environment – human or otherwise – including all the questions that have been asked of it.

The paradigmatic contemporary hybrid practice of improvising with technology requires constant decisions to be made about the identification, role and elaboration of material – decisions that may be intuitive or technical, improvised or structural. The musicians bring their own traces; they generate materials with their own histories and implications. Performance is a continuous interrogation of this process in which memory and imagination become inextricable. Wax is the first medium for the inscription of sound. With the incorporation of digital technologies, every action is inscribed, has potential echoes or transformations, can become part of a new structure or bring a previous action into the present.